Sweet Home Mississippi – NY Times

PLUTO, MISS. — TO move from Lower Manhattan to rural Mississippi is probably the most extreme culture shock available in this country. To do it as an Englishman adds an extra twist. But I fell in love with an old farmhouse while visiting a friend in the Mississippi Delta, bought it for next to nothing,…

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Hunting is for girls

THORNTON, Miss. — Cadi Thompson saw the deer first, but she wanted to give her friend Amber the chance to kill it. It was a frozen winter dawn on the Thompson family farm and hunting property. The two nursing students were concealed in a box stand, a simple wooden structure with openings to shoot through.…

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Walter Kirn on being conned by a murderer

People are always saying to me, how could you fall for it? How could you be so blind? How could you be such a fool?’ The American author and journalist Walter Kirn, 52, eating a brunch omelette in his adopted hometown of Livingston, Montana, is a graduate of Princeton and Oxford, and a highly intelligent…

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Namibian flying safari

The facilities are basic, the transport has seen better days and the bill is hefty. So what’s the big attraction of a safari by plane in Namibia? Swakopmund is a dusty windswept town on Namibia’s Skeleton Coast; its name means Shit Rivermouth. The airport departures terminal consists of two small concrete rooms with paint peeling…

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In Mississippi,Obamacare rolls out on wheels

JACKSON, Miss. — A custom-built bus with oversized windows is parked outside a health fair at the University Medical Center. The decal on its side reads, “Making Healthcare Reform Transparent.” Inside the bus are snacks, Wi-Fi and three booths where sales agents from the Humana health-insurance company sit behind laptops and explain cheap HGV insurance…

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Protester attempts to stop bison slaughter in Yellowstone

A lot of people ask me about the young man Comfrey, who we saw ride off on a freight train in the American Nomads documentary. He is alive and well, and protesting the slaughter of buffalo in Yellowstone National Park. Yellowstone National Park officials found 20 year old Comfrey Jacobs chained to a barrel and…

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In Livingstone’s footsteps with Sir Ranulph Fiennes

The Daily Telegraph are re-running classic travel stories from their archives. Here’s one I wrote about going down the Zambezi river in dug-out canoes with Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Britain’s greatest and arguably most eccentric explorer Last week we began a new series drawing on the deep and rich store of travel writing in the Telegraph…

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